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Foster, Andrew

Andrew Foster

Professor of Economics

Overview

Andrew Foster, Professor of Economics, Professor of Health Services, Policy and Practice, and Director of the Population Studies and Training Center received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988. He is an empirical microeconomist with interests in the areas of population, environment, development, and health. Recent work has examined economic growth in rural India, exploring such issues as growth in the non-farm economy, the effects of local democratization, groundwater usage, forest cover, household structure, inequality, and schooling. He also is exploring the effects of recent changes in air quality in Delhi. Foster also has a series of projects with colleagues in the Center for Gerentology examining the market for nursing home care.

Research

Research Overview

Research Statement

Andrew Foster is a professor of the Department of Economics, a professor of Health Services Policy and Practice and a research investigator in the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University. He came to Brown from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998. He is a specialist in empirical microeconomics and has worked in a variety of population-related fields of economics, including health, development, environment, public, and labor.

Perhaps the most prominent new element of Foster's research portfolio in the last five years has been in the area of population and the environment in India. He has three major projects in this area:
(1) Foster and his collaborator, M.R. Rosenzweig of Harvard's Kennedy School, published a paper in 2003 examining possible mechanisms for a reversal in forest cover declines in India during the 1980s and early 1990s. The paper makes use of a 30-year panel representative sample of rural India, which they in part designed and implemented as part of a 10-year funded (NIH HD30907, NSF SBR93-08405, World Bank ) project examining economic growth in rural India; it also integrates remote sensing data on vegetative cover. The paper argues that, in the context of a relatively closed economy like that in India at the time, higher population growth and agricultural productivity may result in increased forest cover in order to meet increased demand for paper and wood products. More recent research has focused on whether these effects are stronger or weaker in areas with commonly owned forest lands.
(2) Foster and Rosenzweig have recently begun a project on groundwater management in India. While groundwater has played a critical role in increasing irrigated area and thus the adoption of high-yielding variety seeds in rural India, there is substantial concern about whether these advances can be sustained in the face of pumping-induced declines in the water table in certain regions. In a recent working paper, they integrate a simple geological relationship known as Darcy's Law into an economic model of water extraction and use this model to structure an analysis of a data on tubewell construction and depth. The results indicate the presence of a significant trade-off between equity and environmental sustainability that arises from the common-pool nature of groundwater resources.
(3) In a recently funded (NIH) project, Foster is collaborating with Naresh Kumar, who recently accepted a tenure-track position at the University of Iowa after serving as an assistant professor (research) in the PSTC, on a project examining the health and distributional consequences of recent court-induced policy interventions that have had a marked impact on air quality in Delhi, India. Preliminary results from the initial of two planned rounds of a survey in Delhi indicate that accounting for changing residential and commuting patterns can have a marked effect on one's assessment of the impact of these interventions. The initial round of the survey was financed in large part using a seed grant from the PSTC.

In addition to his work on population and environment, Foster has continued to examine issues in care of the aging in both developed and developing countries. He recently received funding (NIH) for a joint project with Vince Mor and Orna Intrator at Brown's Center for Gerentology to examine the effects of state-based employment mandates on turnover, worker quality, and – ultimately – patient outcomes in U.S. nursing homes. This work builds importantly on previous work Foster has done on imperfect information in labor markets, and it integrates a general-equilibrium search model. A key contribution of this work is the recognition of the importance of distinguishing between the direct effects of turnover on patient outcomes and the indirect effects that arise because higher turnover affects average worker quality.

Other recent areas of interest for Foster include: the effects of intra-family contact on altruistic behavior; the consequences for child human capital of marital sorting; a study of the role of non-farm growth in determining inter- and intra-village inequality in India; a study of the consequences of the effects of family-limitation rules in China (joint with sociologist Susan Short ); examinations, in his role as a graduate advisor, of lowest-low fertility in Europe; of immigrant inter-marriage in the United States; of marriage-migration interactions; and of moral hazard arising in intra-family transfers.

Review of Height, Health and History: Nutritional Status in the United Kingdom, 1750-1980 by R. Floud and K. Wachter and Nutrition and Economic Development in the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg Monarchy: An Anthropometric History by J. Komlos, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 518: 217-19, November 1991